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The Actuarial Fundation-Youth Program offers several math books to help children develop math skills. The Student’s Books and Teacher Guides can be downloading for Free in PDF format. Also, they can be order in print for a small donation of about $ 2.50 per book.

Check the whole list of materials. For grades 4 to 8 they have books in topics as Probability, Conversion, Algebra, etc. For higher grades 9 to 12, there is a nice collection call Building Your Future Financial Literacy Curriculum Resource, its cover Financing, Banking and Investing.

I ask my friend Minnie about how to introduce Octavio in programming. She recommends me Scratch. There are several tutorials on YouTube. The program is simple but effective. It is a nice tool to allow children to develop their first projects.

“Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web”

Octavio has been watching some tutorials and now he is working in a project. One year ago, he was playing in Adobe Flash. Flash is professional software, so requires more time and knowledge. Scratch is the right tool for his age and level. By the way, Adobe gives 80% off to Students (Including Homeschoolers).

One of Octavio’s first animation in Adobe Flash CS5.5

Note: If you believe Computers and Internet are harmful for children, please, omit this post.

…The Hare darted almost out of sight at once, but soon stopped and,
to show his contempt for the Tortoise, lay down to have a nap…

2 Million Minutes” is a series of documentary films exploring how students in the United States, India, and the People’s Republic of China spend the nominal 2,000,000 minutes of their high school years.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster that the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It does not matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

Two books that are helping me to decide to where orientate my son’s educational resources and time for the next homeschooling years.

The Home School Legal Defense Association HSLDA has International Services for American Families living outside the United States and to Citizen of Other Nations.

Next a short summary of the situation of US Homeschoolers overseas:

American families homeschooling overseas, are not required to comply with any state regulations. Families only need to follow the homeschool law for a particular US state when they are physically residing there.
As a general idea, when an American family moves overseas as private citizens, they become subject to the new country’s education laws. (If the family is heading overseas with the US military or the US government, this may not apply.) In first-world or more developed countries, families may encounter homeschool regulations they must follow. In less-developed countries, homeschooling may be uncommon and unregulated and/or foreigners might not be held to the same requirements as nationals.

If there are homeschool laws in place, a family has two options:
-Comply with the law, or
-Wait and see if the authorities contact you. It may be in your interest not to make contact with any officials until you see what circumstances are like for foreign families. As Americans, you may largely be ignored. If you are contacted, at that time you can notify the appropriate authorities.
More information about US Families residing in other countries and Citizen of Other Nation in the next link:

In this new school year, we continue the same curriculums for Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spelling, Mathematicas, History and Science, of course; we are advancing in the series. We are including Critical Thinking Books for Language, and extra Math practice using IXL.com. Also, I stopped with dictation. The curriculums for history and science provided enough material for copywork (solving the questionnaires) by themselves.

PROGRAM – SIXTH SCHOOL YEAR

MORINING SESSION (5 days per week, weekend off):

-Reading: I keep reading at loud from Literature/ Bible and mixed subjects.-Octavio’s reading aloud: 30 minutes per day, about ten pages, small print.-Spelling: Continue with Spelling Power starting on Level H (about 10 minutes per day).-Language: Before continue with Year 5th of Understanding Writhing. We will practice some skills using several books of Language Arts by Critical Thinking. The first texts I ordered are Reading Detective, Inference Jones, Word Roots, and The Language Mechanic ( 4th grade and up). Probably, I will include Editor in Chief series in the next order.-Memorization: Selection of pieces in English, Spanish and classic languages. Currently, Octavio is memorizing The Creed in Latin.-Latin: Visual Latin: Starting on Lesson 31-Greek: Elementary Greek Year 3, Starting in Lesson 13,-Hebrew: The First Hebrew Primer, Starting in Chapter 8-Pre-Logic/Mathematics: Mathematical Reasoning Level E, starting where we left the past year (about half way 4th Grade). In addition, Octavio makes extra practice in IXL.com (I am very happy that I found this site, Octavio makes 2 lessons per day)-History: 30 minutes per day. Continue using Mystery of History Series and including Reading from The Story of the World Series.-Science: We will continue using God’s Design Series, complementing with Lab practices and and experiments in other areas.-Music: Octavio has a private piano teacher, she visit us two days per week (one hour lesson per day).Octavio practices piano everyday.

After many considerations, we decided that we will allow Octavio to play video games. With this email, I am not promoting allowing children to play to video games, neither I am in a pro-video games, and of course, I do not considered playing video games as part of the homeschooling, just not a harmful thing for my particular household.

Having said the previous, if some of you, my friends, have decided to allow your children to play video games, and, if happen that they have Minecraft, I want to invite your children to play with Octavio in his new server. There are many public servers to play Minecraft online, but I do not want Octavio to play with strangers or impolite children. So I decide to rent a private server that I can monitor, it has room for like 20 children.